By Olivia Lambert and AAP
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
A Gold Coast woman has recalled her own terrifying attack by small sea creatures that left her with legs that wouldn't stop bleeding.
Adele Shrimpton said watching images of Melbourne teen Sam Kanizay with bleeding feet caused her experience to come flooding back. She was untying her boat in knee-high water in the Tweed River, New South Wales, three years ago when she was swarmed by similar creatures.
"It was like tiny pin holes everywhere in my legs. There must have been about 300 bites," Shrimpton told 9NEWS.
At the time, she told Tweed Daily News she had never come across anything like it.
"It was like stinging. I thought it was just sea lice, and wasn't worried about it until I got back to my boat," she said.
"I went 'holy crap' - there was all this blood!"
On Monday shocking images of Kanizay's bloody lower legs and feet were beamed around the world after the 16-year-old went for a dip at Brighton's Dendy Street Beach on Saturday night to cool his aching muscles following a tough game of footy.
A sample of the creatures that attacked Sam, leaving him covered in scores of tiny pin-prick sized bites that wouldn't stop bleeding, have since been examined by an expert, after Sam's father Jarrod Kanizay returned to the same spot and collected them in a net.
Museums Victoria marine biologist Genefor Walker-Smith said they were a scavenging crustacean know as lysianassid amphipods.
She said it was possible the bugs contained an anti-coagulant similar to that produced by leeches, which explained the inability to stem the flow of blood. The creatures are not venomous and cause no lasting damage, but Sam Kanizay remains in Dandenong Hospital unable to walk.
"Whenever he will move, it will open up those wounds, so I think there'll be some time, probably, on the couch when he gets home," Jarrod Kanizay said.
The horror attack hasn't stopped locals from getting back in the water at Brighton. Swimmers said they had never experienced anything like it.
"We swim there every day and we're in the water for anything from 15 to 30 minutes, and no one's ever experienced anything like this," Paul Duckett told Fairfax Media.
"This was a first, so that's why I query whether it's sea lice or some other creature that have caused the issue."
Associate Professor at Monash University's School of Biological Sciences Richard Reina, however, was confident Sam's bites were caused by sea fleas.
"I think it's very rare," Reina told news.com.au.
"When it happens you brush it off, or move, or get out of the water and there's no consequence, whereas in this case, Sam was standing in cold water for quite a long time.
"He probably thought the pins and needles he described was the cold and didn't realise there were crustaceans chewing on his feet."
Sam's father said the family was waiting for answers and doctors had been at a loss to explain what had eaten through Sam's skin.
"When he got out, he described having sand on his legs, so he went back in the water," he said.
"He went back to his shoes and what he found was blood on his legs.
"As soon as we wiped them down, they kept bleeding," he said.
"There was a massive pool of blood on the floor."
Reina said sea fleas did not travel in packs, but once a couple began chewing on his feet, releasing blood into the water, others would have been attracted.
"They are very good at finding food," he said.
"It looked really bad in the photo, his feet looked like they went through a mincer, but it's a superficial injury and more like a graze than anything else. Because it's a larger area it looks pretty terrible.
"I would expect and hope he will recover pretty quickly."
Reina said sea fleas were common in shallow waters, but had a theory about why they may have been hanging around Brighton on the weekend.
"Maybe the strong westerly winds pushed them towards the shore and they congregated on the eastern side of the bay where Sam went," he said.
The night after Sam's attack, Jarrod Kanizay went back to the beach with a pool net full of meat and captured the creatures he said were responsible.
"What is really clear is these little things really love meat," he said of a video, shared with AAP, showing the bugs in a tray of water devouring chunks of meat.
Sam is not the first Melburnian attacked by sea fleas.
A father and son were bitten while taking a dip at Sandringham beach in 2015, in Melbourne's southeast.
Nick Murray and his son Will entered the cold water, also in August.
Nick Murray told the Bayside Leader he did not feel pain initially and they only realised their feet were bleeding when they got out of the ocean.
They sustained multiple bites to their lower legs and the creatures were still clinging to their feet once they'd washed away the blood.
"I wonder if it was just that night, just that spot, at that particular time," Murray said.
"We stood still for 10 minutes so it may not have happened if we moved about, but I wouldn't want to stand still there for a couple of hours or it may get quite bad."
Reina said sea fleas should not alarm people or deter them from swimming.
"They are just little animals following their natural instinct and eating what they thought was a free meal," he said.
"The situation is really unusual and I don't think it's something people should be concerned about. They are quite small and mainly eat dead and dying animals and because he was standing still while they were biting him gave them the opportunity.
"They wouldn't thought he was dying or dead."